Can Brazilians Save South Florida Real Estate?

If south Florida's real estate market returns from the dead, thank a Brazilian.

Brazil's upper middle class have been buying properties in Miami and Orlando since the 1990s, when high interest rates and high taxes forced many of them to invest overseas in a way to avoid tax authorities. Now, the middle class is buying up Florida properties, mainly in Miami, thanks to a strong currency, and more spending power than they have had in a generation, a Folha de São Paulo study revealed on Monday.

According to the Association of Foreign Real Estate Investors (AFIRE), Miami's improving real estate market is due mainly to Brazil's rising GDP.

“Wealth creation in Brazil is now starting to look for cross-border opportunities, and Miami certainly is a natural,” says Terra Blanca, CEO of Blanca Commercial Real Estate in Real Estate Journal Online last week. Greater Downtown Miami’s condo supply is overstocked, according to AFIRE . South Florida, and Miami especially, could come to depend on attracting foreign buyers like Brazilians while the US job market, and US incomes, continue to hobble along. Real estate prices are rising in Brazil, and still declining in south Florida.

A recent Franklin Templeton survey of foreign investors in some emerging markets showed that 70% of the 1,004 Brazilians surveyed said they would be putting money to work overseas this year. The average within the emerging markets surveyed was 62%.

Miami is ranked a distant 8th for foreign investment in real estate. New York, Washington, DC, Boston and San Francisco were the top four, according to Real Capital Analytics. Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the US is currently ranked as the best place for capital appreciation in the world real estate markets, according to Real Capital.